DRAFT ONLY DO NOT QUOTE
Young unemployed men and the psychosocial impact of social catastrophe in the south
Wales valleys
Valerie Walkerdine and Luis Jimenez
School of Social Sciences
Cardiff University
Introduction
Much has been written about the challenges facing young working class men in the
changed labour market (Jimenez and Walkerdine, submitted, Walkerdine and Bansel,
2009), but relatively little of it takes a psychosocial perspective and even less, if any,
engages with the affective relationship between young men and others in the community.
This paper explores the complex community responses to the closure of the town’s
central employer, a steel works, in 2002 and their place in the relationship of some
unemployed young men to difficulties in finding heavy manual work.
Social catastrophe is defined by psychoanalysts Davoine and Gaudilliere (2004) as a
historical event which has catastrophic consequences for those at the receiving end of it,
though local conditions may mean that the fear, pain and anxieties produced by that event
cannot be experienced immediately because of the need to survive and the defences
brought into play to achieve this (Damasio, 2000). Davoine and Gaudilliere argue that
such anxieties might be transmitted silently across generations so that the one who
embodies the memory may not even know what the anxiety is that is being experienced
and those who experienced it may be unable to talk about it. There is a huge clinical
literature on the inter-generational transmission of trauma (Caruth, 1995, Mitrani, 1996
for example). While Davoine and Gaudilliere’s work focuses on war, it seems relevant to
place the closure of the steel works into this category because iron and steel production
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had been the centre of the community since the late 18th century and while the
community had faced its share of redundancies, disasters and other problems, the closure
of the steelworks could be understood as having a catastrophic impact on a town which
depended upon it and which was in a geographical location in which other work was not
easily reached. Besides this, the nature of available work changed. Basically, there
remains almost no heavy industry in the area. Thus, men who had relied on the works and
who had a history of poor school performance and even illiteracy, had nowhere to turn
for similar work. Most of the work available to young men leaving school at 16 with no
qualifications and poor literacy levels these days is unskilled service work, mostly in
supermarkets, cleaning and food delivery (eg pizzas). The work reported here began
during an ESRC funded study of changing identities in the town (Walkerdine, in press),
in which some young people were interviewed. We noticed that some young men refused
available work on the grounds that it was too embarrassing and feminine (Jimenez and
Walkerdine, submitted). This led to a further study in which young unemployed men who
didn’t want feminine work were interviewed together with their mothers and (where
possible) their fathers. This work used a psychosocial approach, which uses an openended dialogic interview method, paying attention to complex affective issues and their
relation to social phenomena, informed by psychoanalytic insights (Walkerdine, Lucey
and Melody, 2002; Hollway and Jefferson, 2000; Stopford, 2004). The aims of this study
were to explore the young unemployed men’s reasons for their work refusal
psychosocially by conducting three interviews with the young men and two with their
parents.
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Social catastrophe
How is social catastrophe experienced and how is it transmitted to the next generation?
What role does the inter-generational transmission of trauma have in the story we need to
tell?
The story we want to tell here relates to the ways in which the conversations with the
young men and their families, taken together with insights derived from our earlier
fieldwork (Walkerdine, in press; Walkerdine and Bansel, in press), begin to present a
complex situation in which the difficulties faced by the young men seem to be related to
pain and shame experienced by older men and others in the community about the
inability to do ‘proper masculine’ work. This in turn can be understood not as some
individual pathology but as a painful and perhaps not conscious response to the inability
of this generation to prevent the closure, to stop the catastrophe from happening (which
of course they could not, it being driven by economic and political forces quite outside
their control). In other words, what we suggest this work reveals is a social trauma which
emotionally affects the entire community. We argue that this must be addressed for any
possibility of regeneration to work.
Gendered relationality
The aim of this section is to think about the complex circulations of masculinity and
femininity within the community during the era of the steelworks and to contrast this with
the shifts necessary to accommodate the new work situation. Many participants in our
initial research spoke of the strong gendered division of labour which existed when the
works was open. Men worked in heavy industry, doing a ‘man’s job’, often described as
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dirty and dangerous by the steelworkers. Many men couldn’t read and papers would often
be taken home to the wife, who had responsibility for the domestic economy and whose
time, looking after home and family, was clearly circumscribed. In other words, a strong
distinction between masculine and feminine spaces, bodies, emotions existed. This was
often told to us nostalgically by both men and women in the community as a key aspect
of the community as a family within the town (Walkerdine, 2009). It was a time when
people report feeling safe and shored up by the community as family, in which women in
the home were the emotional bedrock. We are emphasising this as a circulation of
masculinities and femininities in order to move away from the idea that these are the
fixed possessions of men and women but rather aspects of embodied relations in which
the affective boundaries of femininity and masculinity circulate and move, shifting
historically (Butler, 2004).
After the closure of the works, the boundaries have changed. The ‘family wage’ of the
steelworkers has been halved and both men and women work, producing a changed
domestic division of labour. For some men, this brings the possibility of crossing over
into new forms of masculinity, such as taking up work seen as previously more feminine,
spending more time looking after children, doing cooking, for example. However, for
others, especially some older men, it produces anxiety. Psychosocially, we could say that
this relation is a dynamic, which flows through the lifeworld of the inhabitants.
Traditionally, the man holds a masculinity that provides, while the woman holds a
femininity that nurtures. As long as this is kept in place, the world feels as it should be
and anxiety is kept at bay. However, we would argue that the rupture to this dynamic
caused by the closure of the works brings anxiety about masculinity and femininity
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centre-stage for some. Indeed, going further than this, we could say that anxiety about
the shift creates a rupture that is felt through the entire community. This is not to say that
there is something wrong or pathological in the responses of the townspeople. Rather, it
is to suggest that gendered modes of relating are hewn from the necessities of hard
manual work and of surviving harsh conditions for generations. Such responses are to be
expected and should not be labelled sexist or reactionary. What is important though is to
understand their hidden effectivities in the pain which is passed around the community
and down the generations.
Young men and shaming work
The group of young men interviewed for this project were between the ages of 17 and 24.
They left school with no qualifications. We chose these young men because they had
refused or given up work described as embarrassing and feminine. What our interviews
with these young men and their families reveals is the complex circulation of shame and
shaming within the community – a shame about masculinity which circulates amongst
men and women, young and old.
… I was once a delivery driver for Dominos Pizza. I don’t know whether you seen the
uniform you got to wear cream trousers, a red t-shirt, a baseball cap a bum bag and
things like that and he found that, well embarrassing. Urm you have to wear the full outfit
you had a Dominos Pizza belt, and everything like that and you know if we was like, if I
was out doing a delivery then and he spotted me he would purposely make out he didn’t
see me like, not be seen talking to me basically because of what I was wearing and what I
was doing like. So again, you know, I had to quit that job. I then offered my brothers a
lift home in the car and they refused to get in the car with me and said you look like an
idiot basically, you know, what the hell are you wearing? You look a fool looking like
that, and that was the attitude they had, they wouldn’t get a lift home with me like,
because of what I had to wear... They used to laugh all the time and they never once went
to the shop as long as I worked there I don’t know whether it was embarrassment or what
they never showed their face at the shop, never once. Everybody, not just my father then it
was my brothers and my mother they all used to laugh when I would go up in what I had
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to wear, the uniform and my friends used to laugh at me… My mother did say to me once,
you know they are all taking the mickey out of your father because of what you are doing,
so basically get a proper job, my mother was basically saying…
In this extract we see Tony’s awareness of his father’s embarrassment, which in turn
relates to embarrassment felt by friends of his father, who make life difficult. The sight of
Tony in pizza delivery uniform produces shame which does not originate with Tony but
with others, apparently leading to his father dealing with this by calling his son an idiot.
The son, Tony, is left in an impossible dilemma. What is he to do - get a shaming job and
therefore be the carrier and inflictor of shame or be without money and work? Our
particular interest here is in the projection, the relational circulation of affect in which
embarrassment and shame circulate. So, he hears from his mother that people are
shaming his father because of his son’s work.
There are some complex affective dynamics on the part of his mother, father, friends and
peers, who all appear to attempt to push away the threat to masculinity that he represents.
He expands further on the shaming he received when working as a cleaner:
Yeah, when I was working as a cleaner on the factory floor and you know I walked past
with a bin or perhaps a mop and bucket and you know they (female colleagues) would
start talking to each other and laughing at me and things like that like, you know.Yeah, it
was quite embarrassing for a boy; you know to be laughed at by a bunch of girls.
Luis:
So can you remember, what did you say to those girls? How did you handle that?
Tony:
Well you know, I asked them what was so funny like and they were saying Mrs Mop and
things like that and calling me names and you know, so well like I say basically round
here it is classed as a woman’s job being a cleaner and things like that, they class it
strictly as a woman’s job. There is a lot of boys I know the same as myself now that
wouldn’t apply for that kind of job again, and I know a lot of friends who wouldn’t even
think about applying for that kind of job, but at the end of the day it was all that was
going and I had to bring in money for my family and I took it, but you know, three weeks I
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stuck it out for and I couldn’t take no more. I was going home and feeling depressed you
know because people were laughing at me and aggravating me all day for eight hours.
And:
I’ve got friends and if they see a boy working on the checkout in Tescos they kind of like
call him all the sort of things, call him names and bully him. Like call him a woman and
things like that and say you are doing a woman’s job, you know. It is not a mans work it
is a woman’s job like, that is the way they see that kind of job, a woman’s job like. They
bully them and aggravate them. I know people who have and they tend to call them like
gay and things like that you know and to some people it hurts being called that like. You
know they call them a gay and mammy’s boy working on the till and you know, where
there are a lot of things that they do say and a lot of it is using bad language like and not
so polite words…
In the above extracts, we have three terms in circulation: ‘woman’, ‘gay’ and ‘mammy’s
boy’.
What are these terms doing and how do we understand their circulation in this context?
All the terms are other to heterosexual masculinity and all demonstrate an anxiety with
proximity to the feminine or feminised. This suggests that what has been hailed as a
‘crisis in masculinity’ (Payne, 1985; Kimmel, 1987; MacInness, 1998; Edley and
Wetherell, 1999; Hearn, 1999; Mc Dowell, 2000) possibly presents this crisis in too
realist a way. That is, it presents masculinity as a possession of an anatomical male,
whose masculine identity has been threatened by changes in work. However, what we
begin to see here is that the problem is not a problem with the masculine per se, but a
problem with the feminine. These three terms appear to articulate the problem as
concerning too much proximity to, or not enough distance from, the feminine. This
suggests to us that the problem is not the work per se but the proximity to the feminine it
represents, which must be repudiated at all costs. In the days of the steel works, the
feminine was kept in a domestic space, from which men were distanced by their working
lives, but could always come home to. We might suggest then that for boys, the problems
of separation from the mother have been strongly identified in mainstream developmental
accounts (Bowlby, (1960), Greenson, (1968), Stoller, (1968), and in the steel works the
young man was wrenched from the feminine space in order to develop a hard edged
masculinity which was protected enough to withstand the rigours of hard heavy manual
work. Thus, we might suggest that the wrench from the maternal was extreme and the site
of huge defences, which would provoke massive anxiety should they be breached. If this
hypothesis makes sense, the problem for these young men is not that they cannot find
work, in any simple sense, but that they are caught in an emotional turmoil, in which they
are literally caught between the projections of others and their own anxieties – the
enormity of the implications of becoming too soft, too close to femininity and therefore
perhaps of ultimately fearing not being able to survive.
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We suggest then that it is not the young men who are ashamed, but that they are made to
keep the place of shame, a place passed down through the attempts of the previous
generation to hang onto work and masculinity, through various setbacks, redundancies,
closures and its effect on their sons.
In this sense, affective relations need to be understood historically, both in terms of how
they are circulated in relationships now and through a history passed down generations.
As Andy, 46, the only father willing to be interviewed, recalls:
I started off with a government training scheme and they took me on full-time. And then,
more or less, then the Council wanted the youngsters again below us, they took them on
and pay them less. They was paying them £19, 19.50 a week, and rather than pay me a
tidy wage, they’d rather take youngsters on… That’s how it was and as I said, I haven’t
done a lot since. I’ve had one or two factory jobs, you know what I mean, which I didn’t
like, well, they was twelve-hour shifts, you know, the night shifts and god knows what,
and it just weren’t for me like, you know what I mean. I didn’t like the council policy and
I just came out and, in a way, as I said, well, I did regret it. I did regret it, because as I
said, I didn’t get back into full-time employment… As I said, I haven’t done a lot since,
well, I got to be honest with you, it’s about 16 years, I’ve been unemployed. I haven’t
done a lot since then because, you know what I mean, well, there is not a lot out there
anyway. I just think I’m 46 now, and I think to myself, um, I got no hope, you know what I
mean. Like my boy, he’s 16, he’s out of school. He’s struggling to find work. What hope
have I got, you know what I mean?…My partner, she’s claiming disability allowance.
She’s diabetic and she suffers with arthritis. So, I’m down as a carer for her…
My father was in the steelworks and he was made redundant in ’77, I think, just after my
mother died. He had to finish then because we was little, you know what I mean, and
there was no one else to look after us. So, you know what I mean, they made him
redundant because, he had to look after us because we was all children at the time….
And he always said to us, I mean, in the steelworks, it was a job, you know what I mean,
everybody thought that it was a job for life…
It is obvious from this quotation that the closure represents the latest in a long line of
work and family related suffering, which has its own complex affective impact. As we
mentioned earlier, women were seen as the emotional bedrock of the community. We
have argued elsewhere (Walkerdine, in press) that the place of women provided for many
a sense of ontological security and safety, assuring the sense of the possibility of
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continuity of being and a defence against fears of annihilation that may have been
endemic in a community beset with dangerous work in poor conditions.
The silence of fathers
During this research, only one father was willing to speak to us. We heard a great deal
about fathers from mothers and sons, but virtually nothing form fathers themselves. So
not only did fathers appear to feel terrible shame and distress in relation to their sons but
they were unwilling or unable to talk about it. Rather than seeing this as a problem for the
study, we decided to take it as data, to attempt to understand what the silence may be
saying. Half of the fathers were either disabled or long-term unemployed. These were
men themselves unable to embody the hard masculinity they sought for their sons. Let us
speculate about their feelings about the inability to embody the masculinity which
ensures the continuity of the community, its survival. While the mother at home typified
the emotional bedrock, the father at work in the steelworks supplied the other aspect of
the possibility of continuity. Tom, a youth and community worker and former
steelworker tells us of the centrality and pleasures of a masculine body that comes home
tired and dirty after a hard day’s manual work.
No, it's not, it's clean, do you know what I mean? You come home, there's no dirt under
your nails, your hands are completely clean, it's not proper work, when you've been
working in industry for maybe 30 years, and you're used to coming home with dirt under
your nails, and you've got to spend hours getting the dust from around your eyes and in
your eyelashes and stuff, and I suppose it's enjoyment, coming home knowing you've done
a real hard day's work, you'd come home and you're knackered, real physical work, to
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where you're walking in the house, with a nice clean pair of trousers, shiny shoes, shirt
and a tie, and a Morrison's' jacket on. It's not really proper work. It's not like coming in
completely knackered and with a feeling of, can't wait to get in the bath and get this off.
Come home from Morrison's' and just sit down in a chair and feel like probably you
haven't done anything, nothing worthwhile anyway.
The contrast between this and the clean man who comes home in a clean Morrison’s
supermarket overall is telling. He has not done a proper day’s work. He cannot really feel
like a proper man. He is illegitimate. There was pride in this dirty work. Indeed, pride is
the term most used by many members of the community in our first study.
The men brought pride, surviving and taking pride in dangerous work in harsh
conditions. Coping with exploitation, with strong union collective action for better
conditions, fought hard for many generations. This is the source of the pride – good hard
work, collective struggle, fight. This kept the community alive. We can suggest that the
shame experienced by these men and projected onto the young ones is the other and
opposite to the pride. Could it be that allowing in the feminine man would be to admit a
final and painful defeat – the defeat of the fathers who could finally not keep the
juggernaut of globalisation at bay, the fathers for whom collective action, resistance,
finally failed and was impotent? It brings back the reality of power, poverty, servility.
Silly uniforms that have to be kept clean not the proud clothes of a steelworker. If pride
has collapsed, is shame like a cancer eating at the community? Tearing at its heart? If this
is right, gender fantasies were there at the inception of the steelworks are no less present
at its demise.
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The politics of smash and grab?
The feminist critic Beatrix Campbell (1984) was fond of describing the hard politics of
the traditional working class male left in the 1970s as the politics of smash and grab. It
was a feature of all collective struggles of that period, of picket lines and violent
demonstrations. Perhaps in this light we can see it differently. It was the work of the hard
man to keep power at bay, to resist capitalism with the strong male body, with collective
action. The body that can no longer do this is an impotent body. There is no collective
action and globalisation has taken steel production from this small town to Brazil and
India. Some men clearly find a way through this but a worryingly large number do not.
More than this, the shame and pain clearly circulates around the community in a toxic
way, which ends up affecting everyone.
Social trauma
There is a large clinical literature on social trauma, which is helpful in thinking about
how to theorise and understand the affective impact of social catastrophe. While this
mostly clinical literature is perhaps less familiar to social scientists, we argue that
engaging with it is crucial if we are to both understand and engage with what has
happened in this town and to begin to think how to support its citizens. There has been a
great deal of interest in the idea of trauma though some commentators have suggested as
it term has been overused (Berlant, 2004). Berlant was concerned that many current
issues which relate to ongoing suffering have been understood through a model which
locates a moment of trauma in the past, which then is used to explain present suffering,
without any understanding of ongoing suffering itself being an issue. For this reason, it is
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necessary to be clear about the ways in which the concept of trauma might be helpful in
this study. We particularly want to differentiate between ongoing day to day suffering
and trauma. In doing so, we will argue that the concept has a usefulness which allows us
to think about breaks and ruptures. To do this we will briefly point to some work which
uses this concept.
In her book on adult onset trauma. Boulanger (2007) is critical of approaches which
assume that trauma which occurs in adulthood, depends for its effect on a particular
psychopathology developed in childhood. She argues that certain external incidents have
particular effects, notably the effect of not being able to move beyond the moment,
feeling frozen in time and therefore not being able to fully enter the day to day world. She
argues that such effects are well documented. Thus, heeding Berlant’s warnings, we
suggest that the term she prefers, ‘suffering’, is applicable to the everyday life of steel
communities, in that difficult and dangerous working conditions, industrial unrest,
frequent threats to the future of the works over many years, do create their own pattern of
defences and ways of coping. However, what we are specifying here is the particular
effect of an event, the closure of the steel works, which threatens the way of life built up
over generations. We suggest that it is not unreasonable to describe this as a social
trauma. Earl Hopper (Gantt and Hopper, 2008) argues that ‘trauma activates and
provokes the fear of annihilation and its vicissitudes.’ (106). This can be, he says,
expressed phenomenologically as psychic paralysis and the death of psychic vitality. This
can be characterised either clinging together or breaking apart/fragmenting. The fear of
annihilation is well and truly provoked by the closure of the steel works, signalling as it
does, the threat not only of the loss of livelihoods but a serious threat to the viability of
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the community. Used in Hopper’s way, social trauma allows us to understand something
of the phenomenological and psychic consequences of the closure for the inhabitants of
the town, not only personally but in the psychic and social relations of the community –
what we might call the affective practices (Walkerdine, in press) of the community, that
is how they develop practices which keep the community going and, in Hopper’s terms,
keep certain anxieties at bay. We propose that we have two distinct phases, although they
blend into each other. The first is the long period of suffering from the 18th century to
2002, which itself contains no doubt many moments of trauma: threatened closures, layoffs, strikes, depressions, hunger, pit disasters in nearby communities, and so on. But into
that history, which brings its own pattern of affective relating, defensively as Hopper
suggests, is threatened by the final closure of the works. Here the shared history and
shared affective practices no longer work and death stalks the community. Then we have
a third phase in which ad hoc attempts are made to shore up the community in such ways
as to defend against the threat of annihilation. In Hopper’s terms this involves coming too
close or too far apart. We can perhaps see this in the scapegoating of the young
unemployed men. There is an attempt to cast them out – the father’s friends who will not
talk to him, the father who refuses to go to the pub with his son, the cleaners who call the
young man Mrs Mop. It is as though all will be safe if this intruding element is not
allowed in. The circle will not be broken. But, in addition to this principle which Hopper
draws from experience in group processes (Hopper, 2003), we also need to understand
how the organisation of gender and sexuality are played out in this and here we need to
turn to psychoanalytic insights. Anxieties about the boy’s proximity to the mother and the
need to move away are theorised in most developmental accounts (see above). Similarly,
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many feminist analysts have developed this theme (Fast (1990), Axelrod, (1997), Pollack,
(1998), Diamond, (2004) and Judith Butler has discussed the issue of defences against
homosexuality (Butler, 1997). Problems of proximity to and distance form the feminine
are played out painfully in the examples given in this paper: the women cleaners who
suggest the young man is a woman (Mrs Mop) and thus cannot be the object of female
desire, the father and his friends who refuse to let the young man into the homosocial
space of the pub. The father who implies that his son has let him down. The force of these
can be understood in terms of their material effects but we would also suggest that they
have to be understood as affective practices (Walkerdine, in press) which work
unconsciously in relation to the issues and anxieties raised throughout the paper. Thus,
addressing the practical consequences of unemployment for young men like these needs
to operate not only practically but on this difficult and ephemeral level to be effective.
‘Get on with it and don’t show your emotions in public’ is the advice of one woman in
her sixties. Grief should be contained privately within the family. This affective practice
no doubt served to aid community cohesion and to stop difficult and dangerous emotions
from circulating. However, this strategy well adapted to survival of crises and difficulties
during the time of the steelworks, may not work so well now. Then, just coping and
getting on with things allowed the community to continue, for the safety to be maintained
even in the most difficult circumstances and produced a community of ‘survivors’, who
would not be defeated but would battle on. This demonstrates how a classic humanist
attempt to get townspeople to talk about things may not work at all, indeed may be
resisted at all costs, as threatening annihilation. This issue poses a serious concern for
14
work with young people and traumatised communities. The issues raised in this paper are
serious and seriously underexplored. It is time to work differently.
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